Professor Layton and the Master's Last Painting
by Eliza Farrow
Summary: Paper instead of skin. Clay instead of bones. Glass instead of eyes. What do you do, when a dream becomes a nightmare? Professors Layton and Sycamore work together to fight a creature that can't possibly exist. Sequel to 'When the Dust Settles'.
1. Prologue

_It has to be finished. Once this is complete, everything will stop. My magnum opus...everything must stop..._

It was a quiet place, that studio, as one would expect from somewhere buried so deeply in the earth. Thick walls lined the circumference, kept the dirt from imposing on the air inside, but their plaster and paste trapped silence. It clung to every surface in downy strands, layered up like dust. It was dark, but not in the cold manner of caverns, nor the conforming mystery of nighttime black; from the single gas lamp interred in the ceiling, the dark was stained gold, marbled with a burnished hue that fell upon everything unevenly, as though it had hoped for better things to illuminate than that dingy quarter and its sole occupant and would only go about its trade sullenly as a result.

In the centre of that room stood a man. He was neither very tall, nor very large, and held all the innate presence of a desk lamp. Seeing him, one might have felt disappointed and it was certainly the air exuded by the walls; for all their own mystic, they, like the light, might have hoped for a more suitably portent occupant.

What stood there instead of some great, unmerciful phantasm, was a mere, man-sized thing, mortal in every aspect and underwhelmingly usual. In appearance, he was the elder of his years and stooped by their weight, each one thrown carelessly over shoulders no longer imbibed with the youthful strength necessary to carry such a burden; he had the middling cast of a man who had once been handsome—regally so—but had fallen prey to time's ravishing hands and withered like an apple or flower. Such was the nature and magnitude of this glory's decay that, were men made aware of it, it's state, like its naturebound counterparts, would have been lamentingly declaimed by many poets. For it was not simply the man's body which had so stooped to time, but his mind. That majesty of genius and skill had surpassed itself, slipping, quite unnoticed, in to quiet, simmering madness.

Locked above, the oblivious world carried on. The room in which he resided, with its walls of stone silence and gold-marbled dark, did not care for his decayed mind any more than he cared for the damp that festered in the corners or the cairns of insectile bodies laid upon the floor.

_Everything must end here, my darling, you see that, don't you? You know it has to stop. I can't sleep. I can't eat. You follow me everywhere..._

_So I have to leave you here...it has to stop..._

In all the world, he had eyes only for the thing he stood before, the vast canvas that the wooden frame that had served him so well held proudly aloft. Like a reverent before the alter of his God, he cowered, making sacrifices of his brushes and staining the burgeoning fresco with both the milk and the blood of their toils. He muttered to it, confessional whispers, hoarse pleas and prayers, each turned upon the deaf ears of his merciless saviour; his most feared, his most beloved, the result of all his efforts...his finale.

_The letters say I should._ Sat on a desk not so very far from the easel, the scrimshaw mutter of encouragement persisted. Throats with wax-seal teeth and ribboned tongues all cheered in their ink-black voices, the rustled cracking of simultaneously deafening and so quiet it may not have ever been. They had told him he should continue. _Finish her painting, and she will leave. Paint what you see in the world, Holt..._

Hadn't a friend once said that?

The painter choked on a laugh, brush faltering; _I haven't seen Desmond in years. Why haven't I seen him? _

Impassible, the walls said nothing. The canvas, upon which he painstakingly daubed the likeness of his beloved nightmare, gave him no response.

So he continued, a desperate appeal to apathetic angels and paper demons. Steadily, the hours passing leisurely by, curious as to this latest development in the painter's abode and lingering, his work drew closer to fruition; firstly, the nebulous haze on the board gained form, becoming that of a woman, standing stately and proud; a frill of darkness flowered about the figure's neckline; the jagged, flat edges of jewels started to adorn her chest; hair or feathers—it was momentarily unclear which the painter had decided to give her, but they began to take shadowy form. From the perspective of a base outsider, it hardly seemed as though the old man was painting at all; rather, he was a magician, or conjurer, summoning forth a figure from the misted realm within the paper.

_Lily! My sweet Lily; why have you forsaken me? _

A rose, single and solitary, found itself upon the woman's breast. It was not red. It did not look like the sort of flower that would condone so frivolous a colour, but would sneer upon the joyful and the passionate, and leech life away with its lustreless resplendence.

_And my little girl, why do you hide from me? Have I done something wrong? Was gone too long? It all ends here, Alice..._

_After tonight, everything stops. I promise._

Black tongues bound the woman's wrists, bracelets so tight they seemed inseparable from skin. Though their elegance only served to enhance that of the faceless woman, there was no mistaking what dark purpose they served—manacles, as though she required confinement beyond that provided by the limits of paper and paint.

Detail after impeccable detail, and then she stood before him, perfection incarnate bar one, faceless flaw. If before, the painter took his time, this last element takes an eternity, an endless purgatory in which he etches her features onto the bare swathe centring her face. The stony crook of a brow ridge, the flattened arc of thin lips, the concave puckering of cheeks and temples...slowly, the nonexistent viewer came to realise that the painting—which, to that point, had borne the makings of beauty—was not a thing of angels at all. To the common man, her jagged, gash of a smile, her limpid eyes limned with fire, and tar-streaked face branded her as unsettling.

Despite this, the painter's expression was steadfast; adoration, hatred, rage, regret, and grief...no fear. Not yet...

A final flicker of the brush—the brush he had used for all of his paintings prior; the brush he was proud to use for his last—a gently, lingering caress of the not-angel's amber eye, before she was complete. He stepped away as a man with a gun pressed to his temple puts his finger on the trigger; resigned to both the fear and finality of that last gesture.

_I am so very sorry, my dearest muse. But this is our end..._

There was no one to congratulate him, on the completion of this, his greatest work. Gaslight fell upon her uneasily, sifting greaseless over the flatness of canvas in a way that erroneously suggested a less linear contour, and those dispassionate walls cared for art as much as they cared for the man who painted it. With their wounded pride, they bled silence and said nothing.

With a dead man's gait, the painter stepped to the door, whereupon he reduced the leniency of the valve ordaining the flow of gas, suffocating the glow until it became the merest thing, the bare bones of a light by which no one could honestly profess to see. Gladly, it receded, dropping from the woman with little hesitancy and retreating across the floor until only the painter was illuminated. With a last regretful look at the portrait no one would ever see, the old master moved to shut the door on his last painting...

There was a noise in the shadow, like someone had torn darkness itself. Then footsteps, starting from the centre of that room where, previously, nothing had stood but the easel.

Screams. Screams that unravelled a body and left their originator limp and helpless. Screams that can only be pried from those truly afraid.

Then, a paintbrush, old and worn before its time, clattered meekly to the ground, soon joined by a rose that had never known that roses were meant to be red.

And the walls said nothing.


	2. Chapter 1: The Call on Line 6

It wasn't a particularly loud gathering, but there were enough people engaging in polite conversation—and a select few who, under the influence of passion and a moderate helping of alcohol, had begun academic debates of dubious relevance, sense, and morality—but the low clamour was such that the phone in the hall rang itself hoarse for a consecutive three minutes before anyone took note of it. When it was finally noticed, the company was rather reluctant to interrupt their evening to do anything about it, and so it was quite some time before the call reached its intended recipients.

Professor Hershel Layton stood a little apart from the milling assembly, silently admiring the exquisite detail in the architecture of the hall they had found to house the aftermath of the graduation ceremony. Formal dress had overtaken his customary attire and, while the immaculate outfit helped him blend with his fellow professors, he nevertheless felt uncomfortable in it, ill at ease, despite the suit differing in no way from any other. In one hand, he held an untouched flute of champagne, the other his hat, as though he were afraid the iconic article would manage to slip from his head and vanish. Only one person paid him any mind, the man at his side, who was also unmoving, also silent. Together they watched the world, not a word exchanged over what they saw.

They looked like prices from a chess set, but it was difficult to say who was black and who was white, or who would move first. Fundamentally, they were very different men. One was distant but patient, mistrustful but kind, ruthless but not without compassion. The other was gentle but firm, immovable but warm, compassionate and resolute. But perhaps the greatest distinction between them lay in their observation.

Layton was, primarily, a man of the past, and saw the history of each object as it trailed its years in a fine down of dust. Everything had an origin, everything had a purpose for the slot it occupied in the present. The ring on the finger of Professor Tallow was old, but polished and maintained so that its gleam matched that of her brighter, newer jewellery , and she fiddled with it whenever one of her students made a speech, pride warring with some sad reminiscence in her eyes. Sometimes, when not conversationally engaged, she would pause and stare wistfully down at it and rub ruefully at an empty slot where a jewel should sit. The finger she wore it on was noted next; it bulged oddly around the confines of something too small for it. A woman of her means could have had it seamlessly altered, but she hadn't, and bore the discomfort with a martyr's pride. _It's something she obtained in her own days at university_, Layton presumed, _something precious to her. She keeps it as a token._

Beside him, Professor Desmond Sycamore observed the same scene, and, unknowingly, finalised his brother's summary. He was a mathematician, an engineer; he saw patterns, links between happenstances, and slotted them together until the sequencing of events ran like clockwork. Professor Tallow favoured the extravagant and the costly; the ring she wore that night was earnestly plain, but of quality material. _An outlier_. _She always buys the most expensive thing she can afford; at one time, that ring likely cost her all she had_. She never wore it, aside from this night, each year, consistently for the ten year period he had know her. Always that ring, always this night, always that finger. Her left ring finger, left stridently bare at all other times. Lastly, Tallow favoured silver; the broken little ring was gold, dull and blackening with age_. An aberrancy. It's not to your taste, so someone likely bought it for you. Whoever it was, you loved them, and you lost them, either tonight or shortly after you graduated... _

_You wear it because you miss them._

Completely unaware of her observers, Professor Tallow gave the ring a final, fond adjustment, and swept back in to the crowd. She vanished like a penny in the lining of a suit jacket and took whatever past she harboured with her. Neither Professor moved.

Time had passed since the two ran from London, although both men would be hard pressed to tell you precisely how much time had passed; days melded seamlessly into weeks, and the regulated ticking of clocks had been replaced by the soft slurry of hourglass sand. In any case, they had reached Today unscathed, and were likely to see Tomorrow; for men who had, at one point, expected to do neither, that was enough. Life in the turbulent capital loomed, like fire on the horizon, and was coming for them as surely as dawn, but they didn't have to face it _yet_.

So as long as you kept your eyes dead ahead and ignored the shadows, the lives of the two brothers were as easy as they had ever been.

"Professor Sycamore sir? There's a call for you—line six. They're quite insistent, sir." Maisie Hunt, top of Sycamore's advanced engineering class and prettily resplendent in a silver dress, left so shortly after this announcement that it rather felt as though the words had sprung into existence of their own accord and without the interference of a human throat and tongue. She obviously gave the occurrence no thought, which was made up for by the number of times Layton would remember it and shiver; it felt far too much like fate—like it had been some prophetic force, not a student he knew well—but some malignant, ephemeral, entity that had summoned Desmond to take the call on line six. It felt portent. It felt intentional.

The man in question glanced up from his Chardonnay with a vague sort of smile, before the thoughts swimming liquidly behind his eyes unruffled themselves and were sat back in their neat and orderly queues. He gave the space where Maisie had briefly resided a brisk nod, then turned to his brother with a grinning expression that somehow managed to maintain a veneer of serious professionalism and upmost sincerity. Layton marvelled quietly at the enormous breadth of Sycamore's expressions.

"If you'll excuse me, there is, apparently, a rather insistent telephone that requires my immediate attention." With a flourish, he presented his glass. "Be a good sport and guard this, won't you? I have a feeling I'll want it later." Amenably, Layton took the glass and, after a brief assurance that he would ignore the engineering students' questions regarding the physics involved in planes made from barrels, watched his brother depart back through the crowd in the direction of the hallway. More alert now, he returned to his contemplation of the academic miasma, with distinctly more pattern to the weave of his thoughts.

With Sycamore's recommendations, it had been appallingly easy to secure the teaching position he held. Avenguard university was a massively prestigious establishment and staff there usually had to sport the highest credentials available; Layton did not posses a doctorate, but held something arguably more valuable—the testimony of the elusive and eternally wary Desmond. Layton had been welcomed with open arms into a world he almost didn't recognise.

Avenguard was nothing like Gressenheller had been. It was a sprawling, ancient thing that reeked of importance and history. Magnitude was imbibed in every grey brick, greatness etched into every shingle, and the mullioned windows glared out over the heaths of the purple wracked moors with such a singular massiveness that even Layton's steadfast reason was thrown momentarily off guard. Superstition was almost religion, in some quarters, and places such as Avenguard were both alters and churches to those ghostly beliefs.

The people that resided within the building were similarly odd. Each of the Professors was of a silky, shimmery strangeness, cut from mysterious cloth that united them with one another but firmly rejected the world; the sense of distance he had noted on first meeting Sycamore was magnified tenfold as, on that first day, fifty fish-scaled gazes swept eagerly over him. The students were strange too. At Gressenheller, the keenness of learning had been a dull roar, a tame fire curled neatly in its grate, mitigated significantly by the appeals of independent city life. Here, there was a feverish fervour to the students; they learnt swiftly and unremittingly, with determination and dedication that was almost angry.

Desmond had obtained his graduate degree, his bachelors, and his doctorate at Avenguard; Layton thought it showed.

When he had brought these observations up to Desmond, his brother had offered a brittle smile that was calm, gentle, and faintly bitter, a worried crease brushing the skin between his brows.

_"It was said by a great man that intellect was the light of our world. Dark times are coming, Layton; can you blame us for lighting our candles?" Layton considered that for a long second, feeling as though he had blundered into something in the dark and was attempting to make out whether it was a wardrobe or a door._

_"Do you think it's the right thing to do?" He asked at last. His brother's eyes were ruthlessly calm, his irises tinted red._

_"It's the smart thing to do," he retorted, and the pair sat for the longest time, grimly aware that those two things were not mutually exclusive concepts._

They didn't speak of it after that, the discussion locked in a box with many other things that did not need to be said, or could not safely be discussed; a box filled with Targent, and betrayals, and miracles, and a thousand broken things. What was one more secret, one more omission, in that family of lies?

Luke wrote regularly, as did Flora, and Layton exercised great restraint regarding what he told them. Yes; he had a job. Yes; he had an apartment. No; it was not possible for him to fly out to America, but he was more than happy to offer epistolary assistance. He didn't mention Desmond, or the satin strangeness of his fellows, or the amassing army of young scientists, and archaeologists, and engineers with brains made of fire. It took a week for the letters to arrive in their respective places, and each one was torn open with a brief flash of joy followed swiftly by hollow loss as the empty envelope was discarded and the missive's contents devoured. Each letter penned back was a paper tongue feeling out over the absence of where a tooth should be.

So yes; things were better—infinitely better—but, even out of London, there was a dry-weather crackle of suspicion, a staticky something waiting to happen, and at that time Layton could only guess at what form it would take.

"That was odd," Sycamore called through the crowd, carefully elbowing his way through the milling masses with the tact, dignity, and long-suffering air of someone who has had to do so many times before. Layton tilted his head in query, and returned the Chardonnay to its owner. "Do you know the La Pièce museum?" Layton affirmed that he did. "There has been some sort of theft—they were calling to let me, and the other professors with items interred in the museum, that nothing of ours was affected. Everything's on lockdown."

"What was stolen?" Layton asked, taking a small sip of champagne, more out of idleness than an actual desire for the drink. Sycamore treated him to another of his brief, genuine smiles.

"Some artwork has been...misplaced. I took the opportunity to offer what assistance I could," Sycamore said, with uncustomary innocence that was more damning than any of Descole's maniacal laughs. Layton raise a nonplussed eyebrow and his brother elaborated. "They are apparently under the delusion that we are amateur detectives, and have requested that we look over the disturbance. I said we would be there tomorrow."

Layton considered this, preferring to watch the gold in his glass swirl than risk another sip; pearls of it bubbled and frothed as he thought. It had been a while since he took an investigative commission...a chaste smirk worked its way over his lips in a way that those unaccustomed to the subtleties of the Professor would miss entirely.

"Well, I suppose a look wouldn't hurt," he offered as nonchalantly as he could manage, his blood suddenly fizzing like the champagne. A mystery, they had a mystery. "An art theft to pass the time...we have no other engagements."

"Forgive me Hershel—I neglected to make myself clear. This is much more than a simple art theft." Sycamore's eyes glinted, and in that moment you could see down to the core of him; cunning, clever, and cynical. "You see, it's not the pictures that have vanished...it's the _occupants_."


	3. Chapter 1,1: Broken Display Cases

Archives are, by their nature, eerie places. There's a certain massiveness that comes with the accumulation of history that makes them oppressive, something peculiarly liminal about the endless rows of shelves; they are timeless and all knowing, sanctuaries of knowledge that last long after the mortal minds that powered them have rotted.

Avenguard's repository was no different in these regards; indeed, the issue was compounded by its almost labyrinthian arrangements and sepulchral darkness. The lights were deeply recessed in the ceiling, and this phenomena created looming shadows that reached curious fingers between the shelves in pursuit of the tiny humans that dared traverse it's mazed halls.

It was through these dim pathways that Layton paced, at an hour that most would agree was unreasonable. Outside, the sky still held that dismal pall of night that is unique to the moment preceding dawn, when the sun has risen enough to provide the barest means of light but no golden clarity. Time still felt gritty and thick, as though even the clocks were sleeping and letting their gears toll out the seconds only drowsily. Far above him, in their dorms and private quarters (and, in the case of a select few we could bear to name, at their desks) the residents of Avenguard slept on, entirely unaware of Hershel Layton and the covert investigation he had been conducting since arriving at the university.

With the supreme care of one well used to handling fragile documents, Layton selected another folder, delicately sifting the sheaf of paper inside. There were no plumes of dust, no blemishes of age, and yet Layton felt the same peculiar welling of nameless, excited trepidation he did when handling texts from bygone eras; there was that same covert sense of unraveling, of unveiling some intricate mystery.

In his hands, he held the records detailing the activities of Professor Sycamore from the past three years.

In terms of things the brothers refused to speak about, their excursions during their three year separation was not such a massive concern that it warranted direct address, but there was certainly some strange non-existence of that time in regards to Sycamore that faintly unnerved Layton; Desmond avoided any and all questions pertaining that time frame with practised slipperiness, had not been featured in any papers (as was somewhat the norm for the renowned Professor), and conducted himself as though he had momentarily fallen off the earth, only to return precisely when Layton needed him.

To anyone else, the whole situation would have been immediately concerning, as no man had so perfect a sense of timing as that, but Layton was willing to disregard the implication that Sycamore had kept a closer eye on him than was perhaps couth (he had already found the folder containing meticulous records of his findings and accomplishments and was far too accustomed to his brother's peculiarities to be more than mildly exasperated). No, what bothered Layton was the impossibility that was the idea that the great Desmond Sycamore had conceded to sit and leave the world to its own devices for so long as three years. It was difficult to imagine him doing such for as little as three days.

What had begun as a mildly contentious curiosity had rapidly spiralled after a casual inspection Sycamore's records; all were intricately decorated in his awful, spidery handwriting (an encryption in its own right) and all were densely coded...including the documents spanning those absent three years.

As he had done too many times before, Layton traced a finger over the indecipherable whorls of ink and wondered grimly what his estranged sibling had been doing. There was a little subtext to be gained from the formatting of various papers—some were clearly letters, with their addresses, dates, and senders heavily redacted; others with clearly staggered paragraphs labelled with numbers detailing either experiment number or a passage of time; some looking to be transcripts —but without whatever cipher key Desmond had used, the chances of decoding any of it properly were slim to none. Coming down to the archives to pour over the meaningless conglomeration of symbols was an almost Sisyphean task; doomed to dissatisfaction. He would never work out what had happened, Sycamore would likely never reveal it, and so they were at a silent impasse, with Layton returning every so often in hope of some lightning bolt of inspiration.

_Something_ had happened in those three years. Something significant, if the weight and size of the binders was to pass judgment, and a familiar, foreboding disquiet was building in the back of Layton's mind as he turned the nebulous possibilities over.

Something overhead heaved a clunking sigh, breaking the Professor from the slight reverie he'd been slowly succumbing to, a ponderous half-sleep, leant against the accommodating shelves. The heating and water pipes had been his unwitting allies in this endeavour, their groaning resurgence signalling that people on the upper floors were beginning to wake. It gave him just enough time to replace what he had moved and return to his rooms, leaving behind no evidence of his dawn-time curiosities.

It was the work of a few minutes; when he left, everything was as it had been, and by the time he had ascended to the upper floors of the university, life had firmly reasserted itself and Layton slipped seamlessly into the newly awakening world. Sycamore greeted him tiredly, none the wiser to his brother's rampant suspicions.

•~*~•

Several miles from Moorgate University lay the city of Ellchester, a mussed tangle of a town that perched precariously on the backs of rippling hills like a particularly intrepid gull navigating a stormy patch of sea. Cutting through its centre was the eponymous river Ell, a broad and muscular stretch of water with glossy brown scales and a fine lace of river scum decorating it's fringe. As the brothers walked alongside it, the stride of the river outpacing them both, Sycamore mused idly on the probable findings hidden in its heart, on the river bed: trainers from intrepid children; newspaper mulch, the words of decades mangled into dripping incomprehension; the skeletal remains of riverboats; tokens lost and mourned—jewellery, letters, scarves, hats; the condoms of illicit affairs; the angry rings of jilted brides; the incriminating blades of a hundred murders; the congealing blood of unfortunate bodies; the tangled hair of the lonely suicide...

Layton, meanwhile, walked beside his brother and examined the riverside shops, noting several tea parlours that they could return to after their appointment at the museum. Everything was a little faded, but in a picturesque manner that reminded one of old postcards and aged photographs rather than decline or decay. The faded paint felt dignified, the worn edges stylistically purposeful, and there was a pleasant looseness to the air that suggested that the town didn't much care whether you liked it or not. Garlands of lights festooned each streetlight, arcing across streets, cherry-sized globes of colour that would be lit when evening came; Layton had the suspicion that the town would be at its best at nightfall and was mildly disappointed that they would not see it.

The museum was unmissable, mainly due to the stir it was causing in the otherwise calm street. It was smaller than the London museums Layton was familiar with, a blockish structure with three ranks of steps leading to its doors, and a dome of glass bulging up from its centre. Gold letters were scrawled over the entryway proclaiming _La Pièce Museum_, daringly modern and faintly garish. It was the sort of bold tastelessness that looped upon itself and became inspiring.

Large posters decorated the front of the building, each of them featuring the same face and the same proclamation; a smiling old man—his teeth artificially white, his eyes made unfocused by ripples in the fabric—with the words '_Edward Holt; Autumn Exhibition'_ written in bold print. One of the corners of the leftmost poster was not properly secured and, as Sycamore watched, a stiff breeze plucked the loose edge and pulled it in to a fresh ripple of shape—'_Edward Holt: A—n Exhibit_—' it briefly read, before the wind changed direction and the cloth snapped flat.

Ringing the museum front was a gaudy ream of police tape before which stragglers would occasionally pause, staring towards the inert building with great interest. Policemen in cornflower uniforms milled around within the taped off area, equal parts bored and uneasy. Very deliberately, Sycamore relaxed his features, brushed them smooth, then knitted them into a bright expression of polite interest, the vein of steel behind his smile never softening. Descole was drifting somewhere beneath the surface of his thoughts and it showed; though he looked open and friendly, the crowd parted respectfully before him, each of them sensing something indomitable and tempestuous within the mild mannered academic. Layton pursued closely, content to let his brother handle negotiations as he had been the one initially contacted; it would hardly be gentlemanly to undermine anyone...

There was a brief discussion, and then the professors were slipping under the tape, escorted by one Constable Jameson, who was earnest, and fresh faced, and not yet jaded enough to find his limited part dull.

"They've no idea how it was done, Professors," he gabbled, taking long, confident strides down cool corridors lined with abstract smudges of colour and hung with sheets and whorls of steel. "Everything was set out for the exhibition, very tight security—these are valuable pieces, see! One of the directors forgot her papers, came back to get 'em...and she says the people in the paintings were just gone! Vanished! And she says—"

"I think we will have rather more luck talking to the police chief, don't you Layton?" Sycamore murmured. He was watching Jameson with a wry sort of fondness often earned by his more zealous students, the ones whose enthusiasm bordered unhelpful.

"In my experience, you and police chiefs rarely work peaceably," Layton returned in a similar undertone, and Sycamore snickered. Truth be told, he had been a little leery of spending too much time around the law's working dogs, but the glimmering allure in this case had proved too great; the police were circumstantially unavoidable.

They reached an atrium of sorts, a large and airy space with a glass dome in place of a roof, and large, marble pillars supporting the ceiling. It seemed too grand a room for the underwhelming little building that housed it. The usual barricades of corded velvet had been taken down and replaced with more officious yellow tape, before which members of the constabulary were hard at their exercise of investigation, and behind which forensic teams delicately fussed with the mounted artwork.

To the unassuming eye, the affair would have seemed extraneous and possibly insane, for it appeared, at face value, to be a room of perfectly decent paintings detailing landscapes and various rooms. No aspect seemed to warrant the stir one witnessed on entering. But, after a little inspection, Layton noticed a small photograph tacked up beside each frame; detailed in it was the picture it was displayed beside, almost exactly as it was presented—down to the frame and the grain of the brickwork behind it—but reality held a notable omission, for these photographs showed the works to contain people. In the photos, women of long and lean proportion walked down pier-sides clutching the brims of vast, feathered hats; men with horns traded cards over low lit tables; children—screaming with laughter, and laughing from screams—ran from a great clockwork-thing rising from a lake.

According the the paintings themselves, none of these scenarios existed. The pier was deserted, the tables abandoned, the lakeside devoid of bizarre machines and of as still a silence as one could wish for.

"How peculiar..." Desmond murmured. His analytical gaze swept everything, scouring the room for details as a knife would scrape marrow from a bone. The pair stood central, their initial investigation one of radial casualness as the Detective inspector made his way across to greet them.

'_Mid forties. Just under six feet tall. Badge lists him as 'Detective Samuel Harris_'. Unarmed and nonthreatening; Sycamore's greeting smile was coolly professional, but lacked the warning bite he may have given it otherwise.

Cordially, the Detective shook both Professor's hands with an industrially efficient politeness before gesturing out towards the gallery in stern bemusement.

"It's a fair puzzle of circumstance, I'll give you that, Professor," he stated in clipped, military tones. Watching him speak, it would have been a matter of academic interest to find precisely where his mouth lay behind his prodigious facial hair; there was no parting in it and it barely twitched with the motions of his jaw. If one had somehow managed to reach this late stage of life remaining wholly unaware of basic anatomy, one might have thought that it was the moustache itself speaking, and not the being sporting it. "We've been trying to contact Holt, but haven't managed to get through to him yet. There's no sign of forced entry on the doors. Nobody saw anything, heard anything, nothing else was taken or disturbed. The experts are saying that the paintings are the same, down to the brushstroke, aside from the obvious omissions. To be quite honest, I can't imagine the point of it all; why go through the trouble of replicating paintings to exact measures without their subjects? If you ask me, it's all some bizarre publicity stunt these creatives have dreamt up..." His curmudgeonly rant continued for a good few minutes after that, but very little of it was helpful. Occasionally, Layton would interject with a question that would receive some curt response before the tirade continued. It was eventually deemed best to let him be.

The professors separated, drifting through the cold light of the atrium in a fashion that, at first glance, might have appeared aimless, particularly when set against the organised rigours of the surrounding officials. That was, of course, a fallacy of thought, as both men had clear paths of investigation in mind, but thorough analysis required a proper absorption of all elements of the surroundings, and so they went so slowly as to appear utterly apathetic to the case.

Oblivious to his brother's examination of the doors, Layton began a patrol of the circumference of the hall, following the course dictated by the tape.

Something caught his eye; some bright scintillation from the floor that did not match the sedate charcoal of the tile, some sharp, angular gleam that, once looked at, divided and became a multitude of jagged shapes. Layton knelt. Spread out across the floor were arches of shattered glass, every piece heavily frosted with cracks. Each broken display case was haloed by some similar corona of glittering destruction, flung outwards as though it had been struck with great force...

Something snagged in Layton's thoughts, like a bit of unraveled knit catching on a twig, slowly but steadily loosening. The nebulous realisation seized his thoughts with such insistence, Layton didn't notice Sycamore's return until the other Professor began speaking.

"They were wrong—the doors have been forced. What's odd about it, is that they appear to have been tampered with from the inside; they wouldn't have noticed if they were only looking for signs someone had broken in to the room." He pushed his glasses further up his nose and, very briefly, the reflection of the sun obscured his eyes entirely. "We should check the roof; whoever did this probably removed one of the dome's panels and entered that way." He was turning away, when Layton's hand caught softly at his elbow. Contact was rare enough a currency between the two that Desmond immediately stopped dead.

"Oh, I don't think that will be necessary at all," hummed Layton, his voice melodious and unruffled as ever. It sounded odd, with the backing of the great hollow reverberation caused by the immense dome of the ceiling; he did not remove his hand, nor change his light grip where it lay, moth-wing soft. Sycamore looked at him, red eyes garnet hard with interrupted suspicion; day's blue light made pale spectres of them both.

"And why do you say that?" Layton's still-water expression rippled, becoming briefly troubled as he moved to indicate the patterns of shattered glass spread across the floor.

"The dome is a single piece; they could not have simply removed a panel." Before Sycamore could rise to counter that point, Layton directed his attention to the main source of his current disquiet. "Look here. These shards fan outwards from the display cases." Frowning, Desmond studied the complex mosaics, half listening to his brother, a murky suspicion hooked and being dragged to the surface. "If the cases were broken into, the glass would have fallen inside. Very little of the glass would have been thrown outwards, certainly not like this."

So simple. So very simple and damning, and yet an utter impossibility. Sycamore narrowed his eyes, a thin smile drifting across his lips in a serpentine fashion.

"The display cases were not broken in to," Layton concluded with some finality. "They were broken out of from the inside."

As was the room itself. The scene told a story, not of an instance of someone breaking in, but of someone breaking _out_.

With the police bustling ineffectually around them, and the cool light of day leeching colour from their bones, two figures of marble stood in the centre of the room and thought.


End file.
